


What You See

by mortalitasi



Category: Dragon Age II
Genre: F/M, General, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-25
Updated: 2014-08-25
Packaged: 2018-02-14 15:29:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 807
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2196999
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mortalitasi/pseuds/mortalitasi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sometimes she catches sight of the things beneath his smile.</p>
            </blockquote>





	What You See

She’s not very good with healing spells— better at frying things, she thinks, watching him bind the burn on her wrist, listening to the rustle of the feathers smothering his ridiculously showy pauldrons. He’s such an exhibitionist. 

There’s always another smile ready, some witty rejoinder prepared, though she doesn’t know whether the frequency of them are more for her sake or his own. His hands linger longer than needed over the bandages, the warmth creeping through the linen, and she sees the furrow appear between his brows for a moment before he wipes his expression clean and looks up at her with a sharp grin. 

"All done," he says cheerily, but the way she’s looking at him gives him pause. Incredible, really. Very few things can make him stop. He’s always on the move, talking, joking, fiddling with something or other, shining that staff, bothering that guard, pestering the Warden-Commander, slipping Pounce down someone’s jerkin— it’s a wonder he has time to breathe.

Their friends often wonder how she can stand keeping up with him, but it’s easy when you learn that though he’s constantly running he really has no idea where he’s going. She supposes whatever it is they have is strange for him. She gets the feeling that he’s never really been used to looking back when he’s so set on facing nowhere but forward. 

Maybe one day he won’t turn around or darken her doorway again, but until then she has to assume he’s learning about what it means to have someone waiting for you. Unlike healing magic, waiting comes naturally to her. 

He’s directionless and erratic and far too brazen. He likes to suffocate his oatmeal in honey and can stand those cloyingly sweet Orlesian bonbons they sell at the market at the end of the spring that she finds repulsive, but watching him eat them is like an exercise in self-control. She can tell when he’s nicked some from the kitchens because his mouth tastes like rosewater afterward. The Orlesians love rosewater. They probably have their bloody children in it. Luckily, he’s not Orlesian. 

Truth be told, he’s not much of anything, though it’s damned difficult to see. He’s not quite a mage but not quite an apostate either, not quite a Warden— anyone in the barracks can tell you as much— but not quite a civilian either. He’s not quite a jokester, not with his kind of temper. He’s not even quite a healer. Fixing things goes beyond just a few incantations and pretty warm light, but he foists it off as good enough a substitute anyway, most of the time. 

She stays still as she searches his face with her eyes, unrushed and unhurried and perhaps a bit unsettling, but it’s too often she’s the one unsettled. It’s his turn now. They’ve never really confessed anything worthwhile to each other— not yet. Maybe not ever. They didn’t even start out properly, if anything going on between two not-quite-anythings can even be proper. She’d been up late poring over some book whose title is lost to her at the moment, and he’d crept out of the gloom like a wraith, earring winking gold and yellow in the dying torchlight. 

He’d have never tried anything that night without the help of a little of the mead, and it had struck her as bizarrely funny, because she was nothing to be scared of and she’d still wager he has kissed someone far more intimidating than her without any sort of spirit aiding him. 

There are very many things he’s done and would do unflinchingly with not even a drop of ale in him.

She lifts a hand and brushes a strand of soft hair out of his face with her uninjured fingers. There’s two of them that always seem determined to escape the pull of his hair-tie. He almost flinches, unused to the slowness and to the care. He’s always more than glad to give comfort, but affection doesn’t come nearly as easily. 

He still tries to shy away from the little things, like the accidental, trailing tangle of hands or the promise of touching shoulders. He never has problems when it comes to sliding a sleeve from her shoulder or muting strangled phrases against the slope of her neck when he’s been caught and swept away by her heat, but he’s a stranger to the friendly embrace and to the occasional grateful word. She feels him stiffen at the thoughtless graze of her knuckles at his chin and he watches her with that guarded look he so commonly turns in the direction of people he thinks are not looking. 

"You frighten me sometimes," she says quietly. 

And at that he gives her a real, small, sad smile that doesn’t even make the dimple in his cheek come out of hiding. 

"I know."


End file.
